19/12: The rule of law

BAR Council president Ambiga Sreenevasan may feel that the arrest of nine people, including four lawyers, in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday was "totally unnecessary and unfortunate". But the fact is that no arrests would have been made by the police if the unlawful marchers had responded to the warnings to disperse.

In the event, they paid no heed to the warnings, leaving the police little choice but to round them up and charge them with taking part in an illegal assembly. What was really regrettable was that some members of the legal fraternity had decided to go ahead with the march when the majority of the Bar Council - apparently after two days of debate - had voted to call it off.

What is even more disturbing is that the Bar Council chief has chosen to defend this act of defiance of the law of the land and the council's decision as an exercise of their right of assembly.

In the first place, freedom of assembly is not an absolute right. There are qualifying clauses to Article 10 of the Federal Constitution that place restrictions on this right in the interest of security, public order or morality. To assert that the requirement of a police permit is an "unnecessary fetter", or that it makes for a bad law, is no argument for breaking the law. Rather, this is an invitation to lawlessness.

In any event, the right solution to a bad law is to change it, not to break it. No one has the right to choose to comply only with those laws he likes and to violate those laws he dislikes. That's what it means to say that we live under the rule of law and that nobody is above it.

Laws shouldn't be broken just because they do not sit well with our sense of what is appropriate. If those getting hot under the collar about how unfair and unjust the curbs on freedom of assembly are, that is a matter for public debate, not a case for contravening the law.

Such a dialogue has been started by the Royal Police Commission with its proposal to give permits "as a matter of course", the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia with its recommendation to replace permits with "notifications", and Tun Musa Hitam with his thoughts on what needs to be done to make demonstrations orderly.

The Bar Council should continue to contribute to the debate on freedom of assembly rather than support lawyers who do not uphold the rule of law.